Posted 5/16/15

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Orders of Magnitude: A Timeline

A look at the influence of mankind over time
by Eric Sorensen

In his landmark investigation of geology, Annals of the Former World, John McPhee meditated on how hard it is to comprehend the brevity of a human lifetime against the enormity of geologic time. Even geologists have a hard time getting it.

“They wonder to what extent they truly sense the passage of millions of years,” McPhee writes. “They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abyssal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about.”

A new era dawns as the world’s hemispheres connect, species are exchanged between the East and West, and global trade begins to proliferate. From here out, the human influence on the planet is great enough to form a stratigraphic record, an imprint on the face of the earth, as distinct as the previous geologic epochs.

Thomas Robert Malthus, an English cleric and scholar, proclaims the human population is growing faster than its ability to support itself, making famine, disease, or some such “misery or vice” inevitable.

U.S. scientists warn that man’s burning of fossil fuels is increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those rising levels “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.”

Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, proposes calling the current epoch the Anthropocene, a period in which humans influence the earth as powerfully as the biogeophysical forces that preceded them.

The new year has begun with carbon dioxide concentrations above 400 parts per million. CO2 levels are now higher than they’ve ever been in mankind’s history.

Eric Sorenson

Eric Sorensen has written for The Spokesman-Review, The Seattle Times and Conservation Magazine. He is currently pondering eternity in Pullman, where he writes about science for Washington State University.

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